Harmony Hammond

I found the Harmony Hammond visit to be quite interesting. It was nice that we got to not only see her work, but she also talked about what drove her to make these works of art and things she was interested in while creating these works. Though, I was more of a fan of her earlier work it was nice to get her perspective on why she created these giant canvases with toggles and how she related them to human orifices. It was indeed very fascinating to have her explain how she created texture in her paintings, by wrapping cloth behind the canvas to create curves, which could possibly be another hint at the human body. Also, adding cloth to the front of pieces to appear wrinkly or curvier. These things that she talked about gave me more insight into how to view her work because my first glance at these pieces I wasn't very interested in them. Though, as she described her process of creating them, I became more interested in the way that they were put together.
The collaboration work she did with other feminist artists was inspiring. As a woman artist back in the 1970s you didn't have much respect because that was more of the man's activity. The fact that she was persistent in creating her work and didn't seem to get discouraged by her male colleagues was motivating. To be able to get so many women together to create a group that supports each other and their art work is amazing! The fact that they did more than one collaborative event was great, because there was this continues bond that they all had in supporting each other.

-Moriah Kelly

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3 Comments

Hi Moriah.
I liked hearing about how she created texture too, and especially when she mentioned stuffing cloth or newspaper between the back of the canvas and the stretcher bars. I was trying to imagine how that would work. Did you get it? How did she attach it for example? The way she described it made it sound like she just stuffed wads of newspaper in and left them there. I was picturing what the back of the canvas would look like and thought there must be more to it. (??) I'm assuming she did she stuff it there to shape the canvas for painting then eventually the paint held the form and the newspaper or whatever is no longer necessary and removed. Is that how you understood it? As a developing artist I like to hear exactly HOW people achieve certain effects, especially when their methods are a little off-the-wall. Usually I think people just come up with those type of ideas spontaneously.

I definitely agree with the forms that she used different fabrics to created interesting textures yet portrays the exotic feelings toward the fabric. I was also very fascinated by how she performed the patterns of textures to manipulate the feelings of a human body. I am so curious how she developed the idea of the texture and the pattern by utilizing these different fabircs. I loved how she used so many different mediums to pull off different sorts of emotions in her work.

Moriah, I agree that collaboration is important and benefits all who are involved many people do not like to collaborate, but in this case it happened to work out for all the women who were thinking together. I also enjoyed Harmony speak about how her work became bodies of layers, I loved the insight I got when she spoke how she thought of her work.